Your brand is the linchpin of your business. It’s what holds all of the pieces together in a recognizable and trusted package. To understand why consistency in branding is important, you first have to understand what “branding” entails.

Your brand is more than just your company name and logo. It includes the emotional and psychological associations that a consumer has towards your business. When someone hears your brand name or sees your logo, what do they associate it with?

If they don’t have any associations it means that your brand isn’t recognizable and consumers aren’t familiar with your company. This can inhibit the trust that you want to build between yourself and potential clients or customers, and is why effective branding has to be consistent. If your brand is all over the place, for example, using different colors and logos for different things with no rhyme or reason, people won’t have a clear grasp on who your company is and what you strive to accomplish.

Here are some benefits of maintaining consistency within your brand;

Recognizability
When you are consistent with your branding, people will recognize it. If everything looks different and is always changing, they won’t know who you are when they see you. This can be confusing for potential clients, and can even turn them away. Is your company’s message and presentation the same across platforms? If not, when individuals view your website, then see an ad on Facebook, they may not connect the two presentations as belonging to the same company. Your social media, website, email marketing, and logo should be a cohesive unit. Cohesion and consistency don’t necessarily mean redundancy though. It can be as simple as using a standard color palette and family of fonts so that an individual can tell these things are part of your overall brand.

Familiarity
Beyond simply being recognizable, familiarity means that people know your brand. Who you are, what you stand for, and what they can expect from you. Building a familiar brand is also more cost effective than if you were to constantly try new things. Slight alterations to make a good brand great, are much more affordable that a revolving door of okay branding. Once people are familiar with your brand, minor changes won’t alter this familiarity as they’ll view it as simply the next step in your growth and development as a business. It won’t alter their perception of you as a steadfast brand that they can depend on.

Trust
When consumers trust your brand, they are much more likely to be repeat customers and to recommend you to others, whereas constant change and inconsistency can make your company appear erratic or unstable and therefore untrustworthy. When potential customers view your business this way, they won’t feel that they can rely on you to be dependable and to take care of them, because they associate your brand with these negative traits. They’ll continue their search and fill their needs elsewhere.

Building a consistent brand is an important task that can be quite daunting if you don’t have the experience and knowledge to execute it effectively. At New York Ave we have the know-how to execute a branding strategy that will tell your story consistently, building the positive brand awareness and perception that you need.